September Challenge, Flying Geese

September's inspiration block was Flying Geese, an incredibly versatile little block/unit in the quilting world.  My mind was flooded with ideas.  I have always wanted to make something using curved paper pieced flying geese so that was my first thought.  But then I came up with an idea to make an underwater scene using the flying geese as part of the fish.  But then I came across a picture of a beautiful traditional block that used a lot of flying geese units that I thought I might use.  But then.....well, you get the idea.

As part of this challenge series, we choose one color from our Cherrywood challenge bundle as the focus color for our quilt, using a different color each month.  I had three colors remaining, red, blue and indigo.  While looking at my little stash of Cherrywood fabric, trying to decide which of my many ideas I would go with, my eye settled on the blue fabric which happened to be sitting next to the orange fabric left over from the first challenge.  This struck me as a very southwest color palette and suddenly I knew exactly what direction I was going to head with my design.

Once I got this far, I realized I needed some sort of feature element for the center.  The dancing, flute playing Kokopelli I see everywhere here in Arizona has always made me smile.  He seems like such a happy, joyful fellow.  So that was an easy choice to make.

Not having done a lot of hand applique before, this was a true challenge for me.  Lack of decisiveness and poor planning made the process more difficult than it had to be.  If I had it to do over again, I would go about the applique process in a very different way.  I'm happy with where I ended up, but getting there could have been a lot easier.  I learned a lot from this project and I'll be more prepared the next time I want to do hand applique.

I had only a vague plan of what I wanted to do with the quilting.  I knew I wanted to incorporate some of Angela Walter's Dot to Dot techniques but mostly I just made it up as I went along.

It was great fun and I was so pleased with the way it all turned out I wanted to break out into a happy dance.  So that is what I named this quilt.

Happy Dance  

Be sure to check out all the other fantastic entries at the challenge website Persimon Dreams